Imagine Entertainment’s strategy across Asia has quietly shifted from optioning local stories for English-language remakes to backing creators inside their own languages and markets. The start of production on ‘Gunshot’ is where that thesis meets a camera: an eight-part police drama shot not in Mandarin but in Taigi, the Taiwanese tongue long confined to comedy and melodrama on local television, now asked to carry a prestige crime serial with international ambitions. It is a wager on language as an asset rather than an obstacle.

As Deadline first reported, Taiwan’s PTS Taigi has begun filming with S11 Partners and Third Culture Content, with continuing support from Imagine. The project came up through EMERGE, the development lab TAICCA runs with Imagine to grow Asian creators — a pipeline that has spent years funding scripts and is only now delivering one to set. S11’s Cora Yim and Third Culture Content’s Janice Chua produce.

Kent Tsai, the breakout of ‘The Teenage Psychic,’ plays Hao, a detective whose career buckles after a contested use-of-force incident; Chan Tzu-Hsuan is an idealistic rookie and Cheng Chih-Wei a pragmatic veteran nearing retirement. Golden Horse winner Lu Hsiao-Fen anchors the ensemble, and Singapore’s own Golden Horse laureate Mark Lee plays Long, a crime boss whose calm is the most dangerous thing about him. The premise sets three officers with irreconcilable ideas of justice against a system that prizes visibility over virtue.

Mark Lee’s casting is the tell. A Hokkien-speaking star with a following across Singapore and Malaysia, he stretches ‘Gunshot’ beyond Taiwan toward the wider Hokkien-speaking diaspora — the audience math that makes a minority-language drama legible to a Hollywood partner. Co-directed by Hsiao Li-Hsiu and Chang Kai-Chih and written by Chen Fang-Chi and Hsu Shih-Hui, the series is also a soft-power bet for TAICCA, which has spent the decade trying to turn Taiwan’s content into an export category rather than a domestic one.

Production is underway now across eight episodes, with PTS Taigi yet to set a broadcast window. The wager underneath it is stubborn: that a story about policing, social media and public accountability, told in Taigi — a language most international buyers could not place on a map — will travel further precisely because no one tried to translate it upstream first.

Tags: Gunshot, Imagine Entertainment, Kent Tsai, Mark Lee, PTS Taigi, production-start